thomas szasz existential perspective
Chapt. To be clear, heart break and heart attack, or spring fever and typhoid fever belong to two completely different logical categories, and treating one as the other constitutes a category error. And clearly, he meant it at the time. His main arguments can be summarized as follows: "Mental illness" is an expression, a metaphor that describes an offending, disturbing, shocking, or vexing conduct, action, or pattern of behavior, such as packaged under the wide-ranging term schizophrenia, as an "illness" or "disease". This is self-congratulation concealing personal and professional self-aggrandizement. So these remarks, striking as they are, do not reflect his professional activities at the time. But are his convictions grounded in a searching and fair-minded analysis of the pertinent texts, or are they merely a cover for his apparent unwillingness to engage Laing and Fischer fairly on their own intellectual terrain? The iconic figures behind psychiatry's most consequential ideas. Psychiatrists testifying about the mental state of an accused person's mind have about as much business as a priest testifying about the religious state of a person's soul in our courts. And Szasz seems incapable of doing that in print, anyway. Donald Polkinghorne. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions The orthodox position is that mental illness is a fact; critics argue that it is a myth. [13]:85. Let us say that you have a colleague who divorced and re-married, whose first family lives in a city several hundred miles from him. [9] Anyone acquainted with Dr Thomas Szasz's previous writings about mental disorder, the nature of its relationship to the Law and to the problems of drug dependance (Szasz, 1961, 1963, 1970, 1972, 1975) has learned to look in the first instance for the dualism, the poles of which are to be demonstrated as irreconcilable. The most famous proponent of this view was undoubtedly the late Dr. Thomas Szasz. [26], Believing that psychiatric hospitals are like prisons not hospitals and that psychiatrists who subject others to coercion function as judges and jailers not physicians,[28] Szasz made efforts to abolish involuntary psychiatric hospitalization for over two decades, and in 1970 took a part in founding the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization (AAAIMH). ", "Dr Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist who led movement against his field, dies at 92", "Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged", "Thomas Stephen Szasz biography psychiatrist, libertarian, renegade to psychiatry", "Thomas Stephen Szasz April 15, 1920 to September 8, 2012", "Psychiatry, Ethics, and the Criminal Law", "The Six Most Essential Questions in Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Pluralogue. Published quarterly for the Society for the Study of Social Problems, Social Problems tackles the most difficult of contemporary society's issues and brings to the fore influential sociological findings and theories enabling readers to gain a better understanding of the complex social environment. This tradition took all the humane approaches to patients found in the writings of Szasz, and more, and yet it did not reject the basic concepts of mental illness or psychiatric disease in the way Szasz did. Szasz consistently paid attention to the power of language in the establishment and maintenance of the social order, both in small interpersonal and in wider social, economic, and/or political spheres: The struggle for definition is veritably the struggle for life itself. And in this spirit, I do not dispute Szaszs right to differentiate clearly between Ronald Laing and himself, provided the evidence supports his arguments. In short, Laings intention was to impress upon the reader that he did not minimize the severity of distress or the potential harm entailed in a psychotic episode, but that he did not rate the sanity of normal (i.e. Thomas Scheff, also a sociologist, had similar reservations.[37]. Unlike the elderly, chronically ill or deeply disabled person, her horizons of possibility have been constricted, not by physical hardships and limitations, but by misguided beliefs, and/or by prevailing cultural beliefs or expectations, etc. She had severe psychological symptoms and committed suicide in 1971 after their divorce. In his Preface to the first edition of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), Szasz wrote that he had a twofold purpose: (Pies trained under Szasz but developed an independent critical position of Szasz' views, while holding him in esteem personally). [11]:22. [4] A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. No one should be deprived of liberty unless he is found guilty of a criminal offense. [32], In 1969, Szasz and the Church of Scientology co-founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to oppose involuntary psychiatric treatments. Get EHI News, Event Announcements, and E-H Therapy insights delivered to your inbox. But on reflection, we really neednt even go that far. Szasz's ideas had little influence on mainstream psychiatry, but were supported by some behavioral and social scientists. Liberty and autonomy have their most able defender in Thomas Szasz. This is simple postmodernism, held by Foucault most famously, among others, at the same time as Szasz came of age. Thomas Szasz, and Michel Foucault ring true to this day, such that whether or not these labels are used for purposes of social control or as avenues of profit generation for the pharmaceutical . New Book by Kirk Schneider Released Feb 1st! The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in which the author criticizes psychiatry and argues against the concept of mental illness. Szasz was a critic of the influence of modern medicine on society, which he considered to be the secularization of religion's hold on humankind. By definition, the malingerer is knowingly deceitful (although malingering itself has also been called a mental illness or disorder). Now then, given the preceding, would you conclude that your colleagues current behavior was motivated by a tacit approval of involuntary hospitalization, or that he used it cynically to manage his family? [14] He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. Many cannot weep because they do not feel anything. Second, to be confirmed as a disease, a condition must demonstrate pathology at the cellular or molecular level. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment, but he believed in and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults. Szasz is quite right that psychotherapy ceases to be psychotherapy when an element of coercion however benignly intended enters into it. Insofar as Thomas Szasz describes himself as a libertarian (), a conservative, and a Republican, one would naturally expect to find among his philosophical influences: defenders of individual freedom such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, conservative theorists such as Edmund Burke, libertarian theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek (Vatz and Weinberg, 1983, pp. The problem wasnt that all mental illness is mythical inherently, but rather that the mental illness concepts that Szasz had been taught in his education were false. Szasz virtues can be obtained otherwise while avoiding his vices. Recommended Article Julie Falk of SHP has conversations with six psychologists who represent a broad range of humanistic flavors, including (but not limited to) existential-humanistic, phenomenological, human science, constructivist, and transpersonal. Judging from the testimony of Dr. Richard Gelfer, whom I interviewed in 1992, and who roomed with Laing and his family from 1957 to 1961, Laing probably composed these lines sometime in 1958 perhaps as late as 1959. Sociologically, he saw psychiatry as a state-sanctioned mechanism of social control and an omnipotent threat to civil. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing program that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and academic journals. What can you do about it? In a long lifetime, as with most human beings, he never changed his mind on this matter or any other major aspect of his psychiatric beliefs. Instead, I would be inclined to say that the story of Thomas Szasz cant be understood outside of the context of how psychiatry evolved in the course of his career. Consider the context. In that line of thinking, schizophrenia becomes not the name of a disease entity but a judgment of extreme psychiatric and social disapprobation. In short, prior to composing the line that Szasz seizes on, there was an interval of five years at the beginning of Laings career when he did hospitalize patients, possibly against their will. ); the second root can be found into cultural factors."[16]. Required reading for all professionals in health care fields, and all those who are subject to their unwitting prejudices." Szasz seems to engage in what philosophers call eliminative materialism, which is the view that once we have sufficient scientific knowledge, the language of the ordinary world (folk psychology) will be replaced by a scientific language. Psychiatry, supported by the state through various Mental Health Acts, has become a modern secular state religion according to Szasz. As Szasz points out: In Freuds day, it did not occur to people least of all to lawyers or psychiatrists that it was an analysts duty to protect a client from killing himself. This would be like a surgeon who claims that cutting into bodies is wrong. In his IFPE address of November 2, 2002, Szasz stated: Psychoanalysis possesses a valuable moral core that has never been properly identified and is now virtually unrecognized: it is, or ought to be, a wholly voluntary and reliably confidential human service, initiated and controlled largely by the client who pays for it (p.2). To keep this ethical relationship intact, says Szasz, the practitioner must confine his or her role to conversing with the client in the privacy of a professional office, and to completely refrain from meddling in their life outside it. Just as a person suffering from terminal cancer may refuse treatment, so should a person be able to refuse psychiatric treatment. Existential perspectives in psychology are often associated with the humanistic movement and provide somewhat of a philosophical ground for it. [25], According to Szasz, "the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion. The psychiatry that Szasz railed against in his most famous book was full of myths and was mostly false. As with those thought bad (insane people), and those who took the wrong drugs (drug addicts), medicine created a category for those who had the wrong weight (obesity). We have no right to impugn the mental health of people who take their lives voluntarily in such circumstances, rather than impoverish and inconvenience their families, or placate the kinds of medical professionals who have convinced themselves that they know better than their terminal patients what is good for them, etc., but lack the decency and insight to let them be. pt. Required reading for all professionals in health care fields, and all those who are subject to their unwitting prejudices.-- "Jeffrey K. Zeig, Director, The Milton . Laing, however, consciously decided not reply to Szasz, a task taken up instead by Leon Redler on behalf of the Philadelphia Association (PA). She has not yet lived, and to allow such a one to take her own life freely without attempting to alert or assist her family in any way is perverse, in my view. That's not what diseases are." He considered suicide to be among the most fundamental rights, but he opposed state-sanctioned euthanasia. Leaving the relationship between context and content, and questions of interpretation aside, let us reframe the substantive issues at stake here in slightly different terms. morphological abnormality, is arbitrary and his conclusions based on this idea represent, Szasz's criticism of syndrome-based diagnoses is divorced from a consideration of the, Szasz's contention that mental illness is not associated with any morphological abnormality is uninformed by genetics, biochemistry, and current research results on the, Szasz contends that, "Strictly speaking, disease or illness can affect only the body; hence, there can be no mental illness" and this idea is foundational to Szasz's position. In the 1970s, Szasz was claimed by existentialist psychotherapists as a fellow traveller, if not a full member of the clan (Hoeller, 1997, 2012; Stadlen, 2014). And like Szasz, I confess, I am thoroughly sick and tired of that simple-minded refrain. Szasz admits as much when he writes: The psychoanalysts job is to help his client live as honestly and responsibly, and hence as freely, as he can or wants to. Because that conclusion would not be warranted by the evidence. Does this mean that the therapist is the expert on ethics, and therefore in a position to prescribe or legislate for the patient how he or she should live? Besides his philosophy of disease, the other central feature of Szasz thinking is his libertarianism. Not content to leave matters there, Szasz goes on to say that Laing used involuntary hospitalization in the management of his first family, who returned to Glasgow after his divorce in 1964. Why Do Women Remember More Dreams Than Men Do? Considered by many scholars and academics to be psychiatry's most authoritative critic, Dr. Szasz authored hundreds of articles and more than 35 books on the subject, the .
